Using Ocular Data for Unconstrained Biometric Recognition

There are several scenarios where a full facial picture cannot be obtained nor the iris properly imaged. For such cases, a good possibility might be to use the ocular region for recognition, which is a relatively new idea and is regarded as a good trade-off between using the whole face or the iris alone. The area in the vicinity of the eyes is designated as periocular and is particularly useful on less constrained conditions, when image acquisition is unreliable, or to avoid iris pattern spoofing. This chapter provides a comprehensive summary of the most relevant research conducted in the scope of ocular (periocular) recognition methods. The authors compare the main features of the publicly available data sets and summarize the techniques most frequently used in the recognition algorithms in this chapter. In addition, they present the state-of-the-art results in terms of recognition accuracy and discuss the current issues on this topic, together with some directions for further work. Hugo Proença University of Beira Interior, Portugal Gil Santos University of Beira Interior, Portugal João C. Neves University of Beira Interior, Portugal DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5966-7.ch012